First Look: Akashic Records of Bastard Magical Instructor

Premise

Glenn Radars – whose name is too good for the show he’s in – is a magical instructor and also a bastard. Otherwise, it’s the usual light novel mad libs bullshit.

colons’ verdict: End me.

It haunts me that this calibre of light novel adaptation routinely does so well on MyAnimeList. There are a number of explanations for their success that I try to comfort myself with. Perhaps it’s all trolls. Perhaps the sorry state of that website means that anyone who gets to depend on the kind of service it provides migrates elsewhere before they get tired of the formula, or even realise that this genre is so formulaic. Maybe people just don’t know any better. Or perhaps (shudder) people actually like them.

I’m not here to take that away from people. Whatever, like what you like. I’d just encourage any such people to try something that does something even remotely new or interesting, or even just something that’s derivative of a different thing.

Extremely subtle imagery right here.

Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor tells the story of Glenn Radars, a new teacher at a magic academy who doesn’t want to be a teacher at said magic academy. There’s a lore dump right at the start to explain some irrelevant history, and then we spend at least half the episode watching this dude assault and harass young girls on their way into and at a magic academy. There’s a bit about him being incompetent and boring, but honestly, it’s mostly assault and harassment.

There is some contention among the staff about whether Glenn should be teaching at this school. It seems like a mother figure of some kind has, for reasons yet unknown, decided that it is important for him to teach here.

Later, Glenn makes some more overt efforts to get fired, and then gets in a duel with a student, which he loses, and the show gets to do some Pokémon-style electricity slapstick while the end credits roll.

The plot, of course, is irrelevant here. You’ve seen this show before. I’ve written about it before. This is, as ever, all an excuse to give a dude who is clearly an audience surrogate a platform from which he can abuse a bunch of school-age girls.

The show is self-aware about the ‘protagonist-walks-in-on-children-getting-changed’ trope, but self-awareness about that trope has been rote for decades already

There was one slightly nice thing I wanted to say about this show. I wanted to point out that it changed the formula of light novel adaptations in a way that seemed unique. Unfortunately, another show airing this season, Busou Shoujo Machiavellianism, has changed the formula in exactly the same way, and so I can’t. It’ll make more sense to talk about it in that context, though, so come back to The Glorio Blog tomorrow for more on how anime continues to be awful. Spoilers, I guess. [edit: here’s the machiavellianism post]

Iro’s verdict: The Worst School Uniforms I’ve Ever Seen

There’s some decent comedic timing going on here, but it’s all attached to terrible jokes inside some of the worst light novel drivel I’ve ever had the displeasure of watching. Someone needs to tell Japan that merely pointing out the fact that you’re using shitty, overused tropes doesn’t make up for, y’know, actually fucking using them. You can’t have your cake and eat it too unless you really know what you’re doing, and this ain’t that. We all deserve better.

Looks like Team Rocket is blasting off again!

Euri’s verdict: No Thanks

The lazy-teacher-getting-berated-by-student trope is incredibly overused, but it’s not like it’s impossible to make something interesting out of it. Instead, we get a shitty protagonist with complete disinterest in everything and a completely unlikable student who hasn’t done much more than shout. Like, don’t get me wrong, the protagonist is a guy who assaulted a few of his students in the hope of getting fired so there’s plenty of reason to be shouting, but excuse me while I go and watch, like, anything else?

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Yep, being self aware that you are using an overused trope doesn’t make it any better to watch if that’s the only thing you’ve done. A show full of cliches can still be fun, but this episode is so incredibly tiresome in the way it rolls them out and it doesn’t do a thing to appeal to its audience. It just expects them to sit back and take the overused material delivered in a lazy fashion.
Thanks for sharing.

you should give it a chance or at least 3 episodes then make the decision if its worth to watch, because most good anime and manga a lot of times start off bad. But I do get what your saying here, but at least give the series two more episodes? BTW episode two is out and I think two more volumes are out as well. It did give it a different twist and sets the plot